The first semester was still a small culture shock for me. In high school I had Latin, Ancient Greek, and Politics & Economics as my main subjects. I only had experience of Informatics during my exchange year in the US, where we learned a bit of programming – but that did not go beyond the fundamental basics and after a week of university I had already exceeded my previous knowledge.

My new student colleagues differed from my high school mates. At high school, there were about one third boys and two thirds girls, but now the proportion was ninety percent male students, and ten percent female students. However, this was not the actual problem. Mostly I missed the cultural topics themselves. I missed all the discussions about philosophy and history, about ethics and politics. In the first year of university, I always carried around this weird idea to – at some point – do a second study in art history.

Why did I start studying Informatics in the first place? An important factor was any future job. Running from one underpaid internship to the next did not sound very promising, and for me it was always important to stay somewhat independent. With Informatics, there is such a huge demand for professionals, or at least that is my impression so far. Most importantly, Informatics is needed nowadays in almost every field, so it’s definitely possible to change the industry. And as a last resort, if Informatics had turned out to be not my thing, I still had the possibility of changing my study subject. I did not do that in the end – and I am really glad I didn’t! I also got used to the culture shock, and nowadays I use my free time to deal with these topics. It is a great balance to my work life and helps to get the mind free.

The studies themselves were never a real problem, even though aside from the little programming introduction at high school I did not have any prior knowledge. I even think I lacked a basic knowledge of the subject itself. In the first semester, for example, I attended the course about basics in databases, without knowing what a database is. And then I was sitting in the lecture and the professor did not even think about explaining what a database is. I in turn never asked either because everyone around me seemed to know already (whether they did know or not!).

Anyway, obviously at some point during the semester I understood it. Something similar happened in other courses as well. For example, during the course about computer architecture, the single components of a computer were not explained, there was no “What is a CPU?” or “What is RAM?” Until this course I did not even know that it is quite common, at least for Informatics students, to assemble your own PC by yourself, oh well … I did not even know that it was possible! My PC at that time was a complete solution from some discount store.

However, I never felt like that the lack of up-front knowledge was a disadvantage. After all, the point of going to university was to learn all these things, right? But I guess it could turn into a disadvantage, when someone starts to feel anxious about it and thinks that because they know less than the others that they will perform worse than them. In my case, I think it was even an advantage, as I learned very early on to deal with not knowing something and to accept it, and to understand that all this stuff can be learned. In fact, when I joined AMD after university, I discovered that everyone starts basically with zero knowledge there, because the products we work with are not released yet.